The present invention is directed to processing documents such as bank checks and more particularly to an apparatus for printing coded bars on the back of a bank check for use in processing the check.
As disclosed in the co-pending U.S. Pat. No. 4,201,978, entitled "Document Processing System" and assigned to the assignee of the present application, modern-day check processing systems include the listing and balancing of amounts for use in proving the documents, encoding information on a check for use in distributing the checks, endorsing, microfilming, sorting and distributing the checks in accordance with their final destination. As a further part of this processing system, information is printed on the back of the check which includes a document identification number (DIN) which may comprise the account number of the writer of the check, the date, the processing operator I.D., the identification of the processing machine and any other information necessary for processing the check.
Prior processing systems have employed magnetic printers and readers, together with optical character recognition apparatus for reading such machine-printed characters. The cost of such a processing apparatus is considerable. In order to reduce the overall cost of such processing apparatus, it has been proposed to use a bar code printer for printing the DIN number on the document with a bar representing a binary 1 and a space representing a binary 0 in a manner that is well-known in the art. Prior bar code printers such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,924,532 and No. 4,057,015 do not provide a construction which could be readily incorporated into many document processing consoles, such as, for example, of the type disclosed in the above cited patent application, for automatically printing coded bars on a document in response to the operation of a keyboard in which the data is entered by an operator reading the information from the document. It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a printer which will print coded bars on a document during the time the document is being transported through a check processing apparatus. It is a further object of this invention to provide a bar code printer which is of simple construction and therefore low in cost.